Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) have only done a combined 26 interviews with the press since the Democratic Party installed the vice president as its presidential nominee 78 days ago.
While Walz actually did leave the cocoon of friendly media for a fair and policy-focused interview with Fox News's Shannon Bream on Sunday, Harris has not ventured outside of the comfort of her party's media allies , and by all indications, she has no plans to do so. With exactly four weeks before the polls close, Harris is spending this week sitting with The Howard Stern Show on SiriusXM, sexpert podcast Call Her Daddy, The View on ABC, and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
As with her interviews with Stephanie Ruhle and Oprah Winfrey, Harris is largely subjecting herself to questioning from interviewers who have already endorsed her. But the bigger problem for Harris is less the fairness of refusing to leave her own echo chamber and more the fact that these interviews will do next to nothing to stop the statistical bleeding of support from Democratic strongholds outside of the Karen consitutency .
Harris has more than doubled the Democratic margin of support among white, college-educated voters relative to Joe Biden's performance in 2020, leading the demographic by 18 points. Among white, college-educated women, her margin of support expands to a whopping 40 points. But outside of these lily-white circles, she is flailing.
Aggregate national polling shows Harris trailing Biden's 2020 performance by 18 points among black voters overall, with a poll by The 19th and Survey Monkey showing her margin of support among black women down 31 points from his 2020 performance and down 35 points among black men. The last national poll by the New York Times and Siena College found Harris trailing Biden's 2020 margin of support among nonwhite voters who didn't graduate college by 19 points, and Harvard found Harris's support among men younger than 30 to be 11 points behind Biden's 2020 margin.
The most galling finding is among Latino men, who are now breaking for Trump and Harris in equal measure. NBC News's finding of Harris's 14-point lead among all Latinos nationally is half that of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's 28-point margin over Trump in 2016.
So what does Harris gain with her emerging interview strategy?
Call Her Daddy host Alex Cooper estimates that women comprise 90% of her audience, and while we don't have the data breaking down that audience into deeper demographic detail, Cooper's preferred topics of discussion, partying in the Hamptons and jet-setting to Paris for blind dates, would not indicate she's catering to working-class listeners.
Women older than 55 make up the overwhelming majority of The View's audience, a demographic that Harris is already winning. Howard Stern's audience is mostly middle-aged white men who did not graduate college, a demographic Harris theoretically needs to reach, but his average listener is also in the top 10% of household earnings and, by definition as a fan of Howard Stern, already hates former President Donald Trump.
Only Stephen Colbert boasts an average audience, and even so, he has been regularly beaten by Greg Gutfeld's prime-time blockbuster on Fox News. All of which brings us back to the initial problem, mainly that Harris is simply incapable of sitting with an objective, let alone oppositional, reporter.
Sure, Trump and running mate J.D. Vance have sat with some friendly journalists and pundits, but Vance has also spent every weekend getting grilled by liberal hosts on the Sunday shows, experience that paid off when he cleaned Walz's clock during last week's vice presidential debate. Trump let himself be grilled on a panel by the National Association of Black Journalists and spoke about his brother Fred's fatal struggle with addiction on This Past Weekend, the eighth-most-popular podcast in America hosted by a comedian who isn't really partisan at all.
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Of course, Harris won't go on The Joe Rogan Experience for the same reason she wouldn't agree to a debate hosted by Fox News: She is and always has been a paper tiger who is telegenic enough sticking to a script but quite literally freezes when the teleprompter even temporarily pauses. It's why even the most friendly lines of questioning from the likes of 60 Minutes, which can only be described as anti-Trump after its shameless propagandizing during 2020 , result in word salads cut and distributed as campaign material for the Trump campaign.
Harris has quieted the mildest of murmurs from the media over her allergy to public questioning, but whining about abortion with yet another rich white lady won't do anything to stop the bleeding of support among the working-class, nonwhite, and male voters more concerned with a record influx of illegal immigration and the worst inflationary crisis in living memory.
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